We are continuing in this issue our ReCollection section, looking back through The BeZine past issues and blog posts in this, our tenth year. This poem comes from The BeZine Volume 4 Issue 2, on November 15, 2017. Irene Emanuel remains a contributing Core Team member. The theme of the issue this poem originally appeared in was “Hunger, Poverty and The Working Class as Slave Labor.” Jamie Dedes, z”l, our Founding Editor, began the introduction with this paragraph:
“All of our concerns—peace, environmental sustainability, human rights, freedom of expression—depend on a more equal distribution of wealth, on making sure no one goes hungry and on breaking-down barriers to employment, healthcare, education and racial and gender equity.”
Togetherness
They’re there; hollowed into make-shift sponge-foam beds, tight-curled into malodorous rag-blankets and plastic of dubious origin. They’re there; the shadow-ghost people of no fixed abode, gathered loosely together in cohesive misery. They’re there; existing on society’s fringe, sustained by the government’s pandering promises; sharing glue-highs and garbage rot They’re there; old children, dying people, together in perpetual poverty. They’re there; trampled contours on grass verges, silhouettes on street corners, robotic vendors with nothing to sell but themselves. They’re there; the street-people of forgotten causes, unified in the rainbow nation of lost hopes.
©2017 Irene Emanuel
All rights reserved
The BeZine 